Italy Blocks Iraq Aid Flight After U.S. Request
By REUTERS
Filed at 6:22 p.m. ET
ROME (Reuters) - Italy said on Friday it had blocked the departure of a humanitarian aid flight to Iraq for technical reasons after a request from the U.N. sanctions committee.
At U.N. headquarters in New York, a spokesman said the sanctions committee -- responsible for enforcing and monitoring a U.N. embargo placed on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990 -- had acted at the request of the United States.
``The Americans blocked it,'' the U.N. spokesman said.
A spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations confirmed that Washington ``has had -- and continues to have -- concerns about this flight.''
The U.S. spokesman said the concerns were ``technical'' in nature but declined to amplify.
An Italian foreign ministry spokesman had said: ``We don't have any problems with the designation of the flight as a humanitarian operation, but there are some technical issues to do with the carrier.''
``We received a request from the United Nations' sanctions committee on Thursday night asking for the flight to be blocked.''
The U.N. spokesman said a request for approval of the charter flight had been sent to the sanctions committee on Iraq last Friday.
Under the committee's procedures, approval is granted unless any member objects, and in this case Washington objected, the spokesman added. The committee has 15 members, representing each of the nations on the Security Council.
The United Nations does not enforce such decisions itself, in this case leaving it to Italy to block the flight, the spokesman said.
The flight had been scheduled to leave Rome for Baghdad on Friday morning.
A French-owned Russian Tupolev 154 was hired to carry more than two tons of medicine, seeds and other aid to Baghdad as part of the mission, the trip's organizer Father Jean Marie Benjemin said.
The flight was originally to have been with an Italian carrier but insurers had demanded premiums of up to $2 billion to fly to Baghdad, making the journey impossible, Benjemin said.
As well as the aid, the flight was to have carried 90 delegates including Italian parliamentarians, Swiss and Austrian officials, aid agency representatives and clergymen.
The aid mission was originally due to depart on Tuesday, and had received clearance from the United Nations and Italy's foreign ministry, but because of last week's U.S.-British air bombardments on Baghdad the flight was postponed, the foreign ministry said.
It declined to elaborate on the technical issues the U.N. sanctions committee had with the carrier but said the flight would not go ahead as long as the current company was involved.
Benjemin said earlier he did not understand why the flight's departure had been blocked.
``We have authorization from the United Nations and written consent from (Italy's Foreign Minister) Lamberto Dini,'' he said from Rome's Ciampino airport.
``We are waiting to deliver important humanitarian aid and they say there are technical problems.''
Several non-government organizations have tried to send aid flights to Iraq in recent months with varying degrees of success.
The South African government and 30 aid agencies plan to fly a shipment of medical aid to Baghdad from Johannesburg later this month.
The United Nations imposed sanctions on Iraq after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, but allows Baghdad to buy humanitarian supplies under the oil-for-food program which began at the end of 1996.